


like the old times

by blindbatalex



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Brad has a...tongue, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Patrice has telepathy / mind control, kind of an X-Men AU, no one dies, with mutants and powers and things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 15:55:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20212369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blindbatalex/pseuds/blindbatalex
Summary: It is okay, Brad had thought, that Patrice didn’t feel the same way back.  It was enough to just have him here like this, soft and laughing and only Brad’s, even if it was just for a night.When a mission goes horribly wrong, memories and one last dance are all Patrice and Brad have left.





	like the old times

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bluejay141519](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluejay141519/gifts).

> For Blue, who wanted a 'drabble' to go with [this mix of Halo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHu7JaBLag)\--a last dance with the love of your life--and it turned into a 2.5k fic somehow.

Brad opens his eyes. He squints and blinks against the snow falling into his eyes. Something is ringing and ringing. High-pitched. In his ears. It’s funny though, because there are no clouds in the sky, just billowing smoke.

_Shit._

That’s not snow. 

Shit shit shit.

The last thing he remembers he was telling Patrice to hurry up, that they had to get out, there was a bomb, and they had almost made it, they were at the--

Patrice.

Brad sits up quickly -- too quickly because dark spots take over his vision, and the muscles in his abdomen and right thigh scream in pain. 

“Bergy!” He scrambles to his feet among the rubble, extends an arm to steady himself. His other hand, when he touches his side, comes back red. “Patrice where are you!”

Patrice -- fuck -- Brad can’t feel--

_Here. I’m here._

Brad spins around--too fast again--and the world tilts off his axis. He spots Patrice, lying among the rubble and falls to his knees next to him.

“Patrice.”

Thank God he is--but there is a--a thin line of blood trickling from his mouth and--God, is that a large piece of metal sticking out of his abdomen. Patrice looks at him with half-open eyes, loving and soft even now. He must say something, because his lips move but all Brad can hear is the goddamn ringing in his ears. He pushes the hair out of Patrice’s eyes and tries to get the ash off his face but his own hands are dirty and he ends up smearing Patrice’s cheeks, his forehead, with dirt and blood instead. 

Patrice coughs weakly. His face contorts with pain but he manages to raise his hand and touch Brad’s temple with two fingers.

*

Brad finds himself in a living room. There is a fire roaring in the fireplace in front of him, a bearskin under his feet. The pain is gone and his head is clear. Chara’s lakehouse.

He turns to find Patrice standing before him. _Patrice._ Brad closes the distance between them in two steps and throws himself into Patrice’s arms. Patrice hugs him back, tight. He should smell of his perfume with the hint of crushed pines that Brad bought for him. He doesn’t smell like anything.

Fuck.

Brad pulls away. 

“Are we dying?” he asks but fuck--he already knows the answer. 

Patrice nods, a deep crease between his brows.

“Shit.” Brad runs a hand through his hair, puts it over his mouth. They are dying and it’s because of their own stupidity. His stupidity.

Because the mission was a setup and he should have known something was wrong long before they ever set foot in the building, not halfway up a flight of stairs. He has arguably the least useful mutation ever, with a chameleon’s tongue and a supposed sixth sense but what use is the latter when he couldn’t sense something was wrong until it was too late.

“I don’t fucking understand. We had intel--supposed to be good intel.”

Patrice shakes his head.

“Someone set us up,” Brad continues because it has to be. It was too easy--that the papers they were looking for for months should be in an abandoned library--_easiest job I ever had_, he had said to the team, laughing, when they heard. “Who?”

“I don’t know.”

Brad paces around the room, his mind going a mile a minute. Soft music is playing in the background--a song he can almost recognize--snow is falling outside the windows.

“Do you think it was Quaider? Fuck would he do that--”

Patrice catches up to him and puts a hand on Brad’s shoulder. There is a look in his eyes, imploring, he has always been the calm one, but it can’t be. Quaider left them and he was the one who communicated the intel but Brad has known him all his life, would trust him with his life. Would he--

“Brad.”

“What?”

Patrice shakes his head, frowns.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Someone set us up,” Brad repeats. It was supposed to be a simple mission and now they are going to die and none of it makes sense. How does it not matter?

Patrice tucks a strand of hair falling onto Brad’s forehead behind his ear, his fingers reverent and gentle. 

“_Ange_,” he says quietly, “I can’t hold this for very long. And I don’t want to--spend our last minutes talking about--angry.”

God. Patrice is looking deep into his eyes and Brad wants to scream. Instead, he forces himself to take a deep breath.

Patrice is right. He is right. It’s all over. This--fuck this is all they have left.

Patrice slides his hand so it’s on Brad’s back now and leads them to the window.

Immediately on the other side of the glass, snow is slowly falling in fat flakes. At first, there is nothing there beyond it--just a vast expanse of gray. Then Patrice takes in a quick, sharp breath, and the gray shimmers and turns into the lake. And it’s bad--fuck it’s bad, because Brad has seen Patrice craft an entire city in his mind, perfect down to the faintest smell and even the rats, like it was nothing, when he is struggling with a single room right now.

“Do you remember this place?” Patrice asks gently.

Brad scoffs. It would take a lot more than dying to make him forget.

“Chara’s lakehouse.”

The surface of the lake is covered in a white sheet of snow. The lights of the houses on the other side glimmer in the distance in the falling dusk. It looks just the way it did--that day they came here. 

“Best Christmas I ever had,” Patrice says softly.

Something twists in Brad’s chest. Brad has figured--well, he never thought about the exact ranking of Patrice’s Christmasses--but Patrice loves and is loved by everyone around him. So to know _that_ was his best Christmas--that among everything else--God.

“Really? Because my favorite was when I went to that crazy Christmas Eve rave and spent all of the next day throwing my guts up.”

Patrice laughs softly. “Still can’t believe you told me Bruce sent you on a secret mission. And I believed you.”

“That’s on you if you ask me.”

Maybe he should apologize. For that time and for all the other times he let Patrice down. He won’t get another chance.

And he figured--he figured he wasn’t going to die in bed, not with what they do but--you can't wake up every morning and think today might be the day you finally kick the bucket. He didn’t think he would die today.

Patrice rubs a circle on his back as if he can feel Brad’s anguish. He probably can. Brad is probably broadcasting again. He takes in a deep breath and slowly exhales, letting the touch center him. 

“That day--not 2012, in 2014--I was beyond the moon when you agreed to drive here early with me.”

He really was. They were supposed to celebrate Christmas together here, their little group of mutants. Brad coaxed and cajoled Patrice to head out early with him, talking about how he needed to get a headstart in cooking and didn’t feel safe alone so far out in the middle of nowhere. He was the happiest man on earth when Patrice gave in.

They cooked and built a fire as snow fell softly outside and it felt like there was just the two of them in the world. Like everything was as it was meant to be.

“Mm.”

“And I tried so hard to look bummed out when the snow got bad and Krej phoned to say they weren’t coming.”

“You did a really bad job,” Patrice says dreamily. He rests his head on Brad’s shoulder. “You were trying to look somber but I could feel waves of pure joy and excitement coming off you in every which direction.”

Brad winces.

“That bad huh?”

“Yeah.” 

On the outside, a fox comes out from the bushes and stands by the ice. Turns its head and looks at them, its fur a lush brown in the dying light. Brad tries to remember whether there was a fox back then too, if it’s part of the memory. 

“And what did you think?”

Patrice covers Brad’s hand with his free hand on the window sill. His fingers are warm and the back of his hand very pretty.

“I was glad too. I was trying not to let on I could tell, feeling a little guilty that I should care more that our Christmas plans got cancelled but really--I didn’t mind spending an extra day here, just with you.”

That day--it was the best Christmas Brad ever had too. They had enough food to feed ten people, and enough firewood in the house to not to have to step foot outside. So they ate turkey and mashed potatoes and Brad’s twenty appetizers on the floor by the fire and talked and talked for what must be hours. Usually, there was so much to do around the compound--missions and debriefings and people to talk to. They both thrived in it, loved the brutal rhythm of it, but it was so nice to stop for once and just be, with no one in the world but Brad and the man he was in love with. It is okay, Brad had thought, that Patrice didn’t feel the same way back. It was enough to just have him here like this, soft and laughing and only Brad’s, even if it was just for a night.

He grunts when he feels a jab of pain in his side. He can hear ringing again--it’s in the distance but it’s there, feels woozy.

Patrice presses his palm harder into Brad’s back and makes a sound in the back of his throat. The ringing and the pain recedes, but they don’t have much time left--they don’t.

Brad can feel tears stinging against his eyes. They should have come back to this place. He should have appreciated what they had, appreciated Patrice, better. It’s been so long since it’s just been the two of them with no one to save and nothing to do.

Patrice stands up straight. He smiles and offers Brad his hand.

“Dance with me.”

Brad turns to look at him. Patrice is trying hard not to frown or slouch, he can tell. There is this face he puts on when he is trying to be brave for the sake of everyone else and he thinks no one can tell, but Brad has always been able to see right through it, even when he doesn’t know what to do to make it better.

God. 

He nods and steps away from the window, into the open space in front of the fire. Patrice places a hand on his shoulder and another on his side. Brad rests his head on Patrice’s chest as the music changes and their song starts playing.

The song that was playing that night.

When Patrice stood up after God knows how long and said _dance with me?_ his brown eyes so soft in the light of the fire, a lovely smile playing on his lips. Dusk was falling outside; the lake was perfectly white as far as the eye could see. 

And they had danced. There was so little space in between them that he could feel Patrice’s breath on his neck and his warmth enveloped him as they swayed slowly to the music.

He was so scared that day, when they kissed--people were really into his tongue or really grossed out by it. He was scared that Patrice would fall into the latter camp, of all the ways this could go wrong, all the ways he could screw up but Patrice held him and he had said--

“Not to be scared. Never with me.”

Brad smiles into Patrice’s t-shirt.

“Yeah.”

Patrice cards his fingers through Brad’s hair, holding him close as the song keeps playing in a mournful melody. 

“I always loved you. You were my rock Brad. I couldn’t have done any of it without you.”

“I love you.” Brad sniffles, even though he promised himself he wasn’t going to cry. In the distance he can hear ringing again, voices, louder this time. He holds Patrice closer, afraid to open his eyes, of what he will see. 

“Is this it?” he whispers.

“I’m afraid so.” Patrice takes in a sharp breath and the music fades and the pain returns.

_It’s going to be okay,_ Patrice’s voice echoes in his head, alongside the sensation of a kiss on his forehead, before they both dissolve away. 

*

Brad opens his eyes to find himself among rubble once again. There is a void in the back of his head where Patrice always is and when he looks down, Patrice is limp on the ground--his head has lolled back, his bloodied lips are parted, and his eyes are closed. 

“Patrice!” Brad screams, shakes him, needs him to wake up, even as his own vision grows dim and a wave of nausea washes over. Please. Not yet. God, please.

*

As his head falls onto Patrice’s chest, careful not to touch the shrapnel in his gut, Brad thinks he can hear Chara and Krej calling their names in the distance.

“Over here,” he yells with all he’s got, despite the burning in his lungs, his whole body. He thinks he does anyway before everything goes black.

******

Brad is cold and alone when he wakes up. He is cold as if he woke up in the middle of the night in January and the heating broke down, and he is floating--in something that is not remotely warm.

_Brad!_, someone calls out to him, but he is alone because he can’t feel Patrice--there is a cold void where Patrice’s mind usually rests so warmly against his own. 

He opens his eyes. Light rushes in, too much of it but he doesn’t care. He is not dead, somehow, but Patrice--he can’t feel Patrice. He sits up, calling Patrice’s name, even as the muscles in his side burn. Hands try to push him back down but he fights against them, clawing and kicking, because he needs to find Patrice. He can’t and he has to.

“Need a sedative,” someone says in the background and a cold liquid enters his arm, drains the energy out of his limbs. He falls back, dizzy but-- _“Brad!” someone else is saying. There is a hand on his cheek_ \-- in time to smack someone with his tongue. The man gives a yelp. _Fuck!_

_Brad!_ the voice says again and Brad is going to smack him too when he realizes it’s--Krej. It’s Krej.

“Look,” Krej says, “Brad look,” as he points to Brad’s left with his index finger.

Brad’s eyes are growing heavy and his head is spinning but he still manages to follow Krej’s finger, promising himself to kill him if it’s a trick.

But when he turns his head--he makes a strangled sound.

“He is fine,” Krej says, “he is just resting. You are both going to be fine.”

It’s Patrice. Lying in the next bed over. And his skin is pale and there is an oxygen mask over his face and he is so very still but it’s Patrice. Brad forces his eyes to focus on the monitor Patrice is hooked to, watches it flash steadily even as darkness pulls him back in. He is alive and so is Patrice.

***

Next time he wakes up there is a blanket over him, he can feel its fuzzy texture against his skin, and the sun is shining on his face. He smiles, reveling in its his warmth, doesn’t have to do a single thing to know where it’s coming from. 

_Hey_, he says without making a sound. He feels like shit. His head is filled with cotton, his thoughts are muddy, and his body hurts all over. And he is the happiest man alive.

_Hey_, Patrice replies back.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading friends! I am waiting for a life changing and very stressful email so if you liked the story please drop me a line and give me a pleasant reason to refresh my email. Also--
> 
> > I am on tumblr @blindbatalex, and open to prompts, asks, and general yelling if you want to do that  
> Since Patrice can craft alternate realities with/in his mind, consider a fic in this universe in which Patrice is hurt / drugged / what have you on a different occasion, and he gets lost inside his own mind--they can't wake him. So Brad has to go into the intricate nightmare realities his subconscious has constructed--a city of it in Patrice's mind, to find him and bring him back. o.o  
> Did I have to give Brad a chameleon's tongue? No. But also like, consider.


End file.
